Focus on Funds: Silver Rising

The economically sensitive metal headed higher, thanks in part to news from China. Also: Frontier markets are having a good year, and a new way to invest in hedge funds.

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

I ... silver is bouncing back on Jack Otter and varied stock on Europe Brendan Conway director Focus on Funds lot ... of random let's talk about silver very popular but ... not such a good trade for much of the year as it went down alongside gold down silver's looking shiny ... yet you know Jack silver it was funny because it has these two worlds from the one hand like gold it's a precious metal so some investors viewed ... as a store of value ... but also had year three of the fear that exactly ... but it also has this um you know fairly high sensitivity to global ... you know I'll put global growth ... on him silver is used in the know are ... Atwood converters in the sorts of thing ... so as you seeing nine date improving Europe and China lately ... on the price of silver has been especially sensitive to that ... doing quite well with ... so with when I mean that he hears Bernanke was a slowdown in China but we're seeing some good numbers this is helping to silver ... is China not really slowing down so much we don't ... know if you judge by the numbers coming out of China which Ellis had a big ... asterisk attached to them things are looking better there in fact the selloff that he's seen ... you know ... um across emerging markets lately has not really effective China ... speaking of emerging markets selloff on the emerging isn't quite scary enough for you ... you're talking about frontier markets in Europe on ... the frontier markets have actually done quite well but ... we shouldn't think that that's the no risk proposition ... that's that's exactly right Jack yet ... there's a fund out I in movie unless you're super high shares ... that tracks these you know ... basically these markets that are not developed enough even to be part of you know pro quo for emerging markets ... to call friends here ... and you know their places like ... Bangladesh Argentina ... um all kinds of risks there in one step it was really interesting bit was than Wall Street Journal for the weekend ... Vanguard group is calculated that ... if someone needs to sell a hundred million dollars of that kind of a plain vanilla ... pm finds ... that takes about an hour ... it takes more than ten days for these frontier funds even if there ever get that large that it's just a very illiquid place to be ... out but the setup about ten percent on the U S or ... not ... and now let's try to keep it simple for my brain ... which you write about pensions and other businesses to investors ... trying to invest in hedge fund baby ... then I can do because I thought was a whole point of ... hedge funds is to get often opted out ... of the of course hedge funds also underperformed ... there is a plateau in one hedge fund if I could get some fell into this ... subject read that the key the key insight here is their folks out there arguing that ... it would doesn't make any sense to go find a star manager can you know what benchmarks and gave the returns that are independent from ... the Essen P a as as much as it does ... to try to figure out what the process sees are and then decline to ... try to quantitatively replicate that and that's what a lot of these funds are doing ... to basically trying to walk down what you know a manager ... who ... doesn't read the Essen P five hundred would be doing in the strategies ... ALM that gets to your second point is why we Jilin raucous of hedge funds but say are are are up only ... five percent this year when the SNP is up sixteen percent ... the answer is over a longer period ... they can avoid some of those Steve drawdowns at least the best managers ... and so if your goal is avoiding losses it can sometimes make sense to be in this cannot able to do it at a cheaper price from two inclined have been struck ... a note to two and twenty I think is pretty standard in the end of the fees are coming down but ... he deftly have to